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The Truth About The Coming Insurrection Or, the Misadventures of a 'Pataphysical Hoax by The Indigestible

Who's Your Daddy? (click to enlarge)

 

Who Has the Hottest Half? (click to enlarge)
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Obviously, the other great design that I pursued against the blandness of contemporary 'Pataphysicians was to renew a less reserved conception of Operational 'Pataphysics . . . which otherwise seems to want to retreat into the innocent games of a confidential journal (Viridis Candela),[2] which is only read by slipper-wearing 'Pataphysicians. To my mind, it is quite regrettable that we have lost the gesture of Jarry, who never hesitated to breathe the life of 'Pataphysical wind into more visible journals and revues . . . . Thus, a little wearied by our current group of fake trolls (who actually only know how to troll each other), I have undertaken to revive the flame of La Chandelle verte,[3] to revivify this audacious, "situological"[4] vein of the College, [which is] that of the false Rimbaud in which Baudrillard participated; that of the forms of the pseudo-Torma, the pseudo-Lubin. . . .[5]

A sign of the times, my book's power of grotesque fire has, finally, not been revealed by a few sagacious minds. My little opus, with its salutary apocalyptic buffoonery, its tightrope-number upon the wire of parodic turnarounds, was certainly more than a revolutionary fire ship, but also something other than a simple farce: a parody that carefully mimed the tics, tics and tics of militant [mobilisateur] discourse by distilling in it a powerful intravenous satire, there is of course [some] edification in its aims. I have in fact conceived of this text as a vaccine that resorts to aesthetics -- Grade-Z kitsch, as it turns out: the rather suspect "Invisible Committee," the latent content of which my signature will reveal to all the adepts of crypto-Lacanism, had to arouse suspicion, it seems to me -- so as to prevent any fascination with small-group armed struggle, modern-day Robin Hoods, or Blanquis in the robes of Rael. You can see the height of the irony. Some people, rather uneducated, have gone as far as comparing me to Breton and Debord, which constitutes the best validation of the Marxist axiom that history only repeats itself as farce. And they say that I aspired to this form of superior realism, which itself authorizes laughter ('Pataphysical research as scientific explication of the world),

...

The intestinal creativity of Pere Ubu was certainly unlimited, and his spiral was sufficiently large enough to welcome the greatest world, including that which seemed a priori to be the least integrable: our dissident 'Pataphysician (?) has remembered the magic, just like Hassan-i-Sabbah's "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

Related Archives:

Ubu Roi's Belly Revisited 

J.K. Huysmans: Up the Anti-Naturalist's Arsehole

Sexiest Mannequin of the Year!

The Eugenics Wars

Ubu Roi's Belly Revisited

Ubu Roi. A play by Alfred Jarry, 1896.

...if I did not feel that their benevolence had found Ubu's belly big with more satirical symbols than we can possibly pump up tonight. The Swedenborgian philosopher Mésès has excellently compared rudimentary creations with the most perfect, and embryonic beings with the most complete, in that the former lack all irregularities, protuberances and qualities, which leaves them in more or less spherical form, like the ovum and M. Ubu, while the latter have added so many personal details that they remain equally spherical, following the axiom that the most polished object is that which presents the greatest number of sharp corners. That is why you are free to see in M. Ubu however many allusions you care to, or else a simple puppet — a schoolboy's caricature of one of his professors who personified for him all the ugliness in the world. - Alfred Jarry, opening speech.

...

"The central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with his world," wrote Jane Taylor. "Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification." Jarry's metaphor for the modern man, he is an antihero — fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, cruel, cowardly and evil...

Jarry satirises European philosophies and their absurd practices — in particular the propensity of the complacent bourgeois to abuse the authority engendered by success.

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 Max Ernst, Ubu Imperator, 1923

..Père Ubu, the grotesque symbol of authority invented by Alfred Jarry, is given visual shape in playful derision. What is more, in this guise there reappears the childhood of Max Ernst, a vision of "half-slumber", as he himself described it, in which all the prestige of paternal authority and likewise of artistic creation is de-sacralised. Behind the buffoonery of power alluded to by Ubu as a spinning top, the whole traditional aesthetic of rational construction and geometric perspective is also ridiculed.

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For Jarry, Pataphysics is the anti-scientific realm beyond metaphysics that examines the laws which preside over exceptions - an attempt to elucidate an imaginary cosmos. Jarry specifically defined Pataphysics as the “science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments”. (*4)

So we recognize here some rhizomatic roots that may have nurtured Baudrillard's hyperbolic and jaded view of an incongruous virtual-reality drenched world. In Jarry we already relish an artificial Baudrillardian simulated world created by an hallucinatory social structure where shimmering objects decree in odd ways what people can and cannot do within the vast void of virtuality. Indeed, like Jarry, Baudrillard mostly arrives at this social examination without demonstrating any sustained systematic analysis. Poof! Voila: a gaseous bon délire: an airy imaginary solution. But in Pataphysics, every occurrence in the universe is established to be an extraordinary event. No simulation possible.

Of course this aim of creating an inorganic world ex nihilo and luxuriating in its rarefied artificiality was not unique to Jarry. Indeed it was perfectly articulated in 1884 with the publication of Joris-Karl Huysmans's décadent novel A Rebours (Against Nature), a story of a recluse art worshiper who yearns for new sensations and perverse pleasures within a transcendental artificial ideal.

Book Review of Jean Baudrillard’s Pataphysics

http://post.thing.net/node/1349

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This is what Baudrillard meant by a total revolution: a strategy geared to escalate the system and push it to its breaking point. Then, giving up on every pretence of rationality, it would start revolving and achieve in the process a circularity of its own:” We know the potential of tautology when it reinforces the system’s claim to perfect sphericity (Ubu Roi’s belly)” (SE, p.4). Coming back full circle to his early pataphysical roots, Baudrillard was taunting capital to emulate Jarry’s absurdism—and share in Ubu’s grotesque fate. After all, wasn’t capitalism itself a pataphysical proposition? It was endlessly cutting the branch on which it sits, devastating the planet and endangering the human species while claiming to improve its lot. Capital didn’t care a fig for the fate of humanity. The real wasn’t its business. It had canceled the principle of reality and substituted a codification of a higher order, a hyper-reality that made the real obsolete. Its dirge-like flows were self-referential, leaving everything else in a state of self-induced simulation. The flows of capital were posthumous, post-human. In their nihilistic energy, they carried the seeds of their own destruction. Only Ubu, Jarry’s truculent hero, the coward king cannibalizing his own entourage, and himself in the process, could account for such a bullish cynicism. The society of the spectacle was turning into a soft version of the theater of cruelty, a burlesque of death with the globe as its stage. Life was being exchanged for nothing, for a handful of glittering toys, work absorbed time like a sponge and left no traces. Baudrillard wasn’t the exterminator, but the system itself. Yet no one was paying attention.

Nattefrost in his Bathtub, Oslo, 2005 (Hillary Clinton in Africa, American Utopias)

 
Nattefrost in his Bathtub, Oslo, 2005 - Peter Beste,  http://www.stevenkasher.com/html/artistresults.asp?artist=333

I can hypnotize a man without his knowledge or consent into committing treason against the United States.- Dr. Estabrooks - Chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University, 

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has helped clear rubble and plant flowers as she visited two housing schemes near Cape Town, South Africa.

They cleared rubble from the site and planted flowers and a tree.

"This is what I really believe in," she was quoted as saying during the tour. "I mean, I have travelled literally all over the world and when people organise themselves and are given the tools and the training to really empower themselves and their future and build houses and communities, that's what's lasting."

When one woman asked if Mrs Clinton wanted to make a contribution she explained she had no money on her, and turned to Africa envoy Johnnie Carson, who drew a $50 note from his wallet. "These are good businesswomen," Mrs Clinton said.

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American Utopias

From the point of view of most Hollywood filmmaking, these utopian strategies are used to mirror the hegemonic structures found in society. Instead of imagining an alternate space as a resistance to dominant society, these films place USA as the utopian space. Such an argument follows what Jean Baudrillard provocatively argues in his book America: the US is utopia achieved and because of this, there are no poor people in USA. ”The have-nots will be condemned to oblivion, to abandonment, to disappearance pure and simple. […] And rightly so, since they show such bad taste as to deviate from general consensus.” (Baudrillard 111). Baudrillard’s argument must of course be understood as ironic, and as pointing to the ideological erasure of the poor, rather than a serious argument of no poverty in America.

...

Consider Gattaca (Andrew Niccol 1997) which portrays the struggle of Vincent who tries to become an astronaut despite being considered an in-valid, due to his faulty genes. Diagnosed with a life expectancy of no more than 30 years, Vincent goes on to prove the system wrong by living longer and becoming an astronaut in spite of the immediate rejection. However, this does not result in the film portraying the system as problematic, but simply presenting Vincent as a heroic figure. Society is not challenged, as Vincent is praised. Here, the film rejects sympathizing with the in-valids and by extension those that the in-valid symbolically represent: poor people and people of color. The film’s conclusion is the individual’s victory over the system, not the collapse or change of society. The individual succeeds in spite of the society, but this also indicates that anyone may succeed, despite the conditions they are born. Matters of race and class – folded into the image of the in-valids – are rejected as arguments for one’s situation. The geneticism Vincent faces can still be conquered, if you work hard enough: no social divide is so large that it cannot be overcome. While this may seem as a positive thing, it is also reactionary view which denies the need for change, since “the talented will overcome”.

(excerpts)

New Mappings (Denmark)

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ce399 note:

Do you really want to spend the rest of your life on this planet being a "photo-journalist" at Auschwitz?

Forget Foucault by Jean Baudrillard (Introduction)

 

Sleeping With The Enemy

This was a major shift in political theory. Actually and contrary to all appearances, it wasn’t unlike what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari advocated in Anti-Oedipus [Capitalism and Schizophrenia], or Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punishment, in the wake of May ’68.

…

Marxist rhetoric in politics had bottomed out. The student rebellion had proved at least one thing: the French Communist Party, trade-unions and the working class—the entire institutional left—had ceased to be revolutionary.

…

No wonder French post-’68 thinkers, Baudrillard included, looked somewhere else for revolutionary alternatives. Failing to enlist their allies, they resolved to sleep with the enemy.

…

All of the ‘children of May,’ revolutionaries bereft of a revolution, turned to capitalism, eager to extract its subversive energy they no longer found in traditional class struggles. Updating the theory of power and the fluctuations of subjectivity to the erratic shifts of the semiotic code, they assumed that they could redirect its flows and release in their wake new “deterritorialized” figures—psychotic creativity, desire, nomadism, becoming revolutionary—in spite of the abrupt “reterritorializations” that the system was bound to impose in order to insure its own survival. (Deterritorializations result from the absolute decodification of capital.)

Baudrillard didn’t disagree with them on the nature of the beast, only on the extent of the damage. Contrary to them, he maintained that their willful distinctions between various “regimes of madness,” or between thresholds and gradients of intensity (necessary to identify the direction and consistency of the flows) could not hold anymore. Libidinal distinctions would prove powerless to stem the flow. He saw them as doomed attempts to reintroduce a modicum of human agency in a process that had become both irreversible (linear, cumulative) and inhuman. Energetic and intense, capital was gradually gnawing away at every singularity. Simulating its fluidity, they had been engulfed by it. Revolution had come and gone; they arrived too late, one day after the orgy, like Kafka’s Messiah. Boldly going beyond Marx, they had simply lost their moorings. “Theoretical production, like material production, “ Baudrillard wrote, “loses its determinacy and begins to turn around itself, slipping en abyme toward a reality that cannot be found. This is where we are today: indeterminacy, the era of floating theories, as much as floating money…” (Symbolic Exchange, p.44). All the efforts to enlist capitalism on their side were bound to fail. The only way out of the morass was a radical leap of faith, a flight into the unknown. Only an absolute deterritorialization of theory itself could meet the absolute challenge of capital.

This is what Baudrillard meant by a total revolution: a strategy geared to escalate the system and push it to its breaking point. Then, giving up on every pretence of rationality, it would start revolving and achieve in the process a circularity of its own:” We know the potential of tautology when it reinforces the system’s claim to perfect sphericity (Ubu Roi’s belly)” (SE, p.4). Coming back full circle to his early pataphysical roots, Baudrillard was taunting capital to emulate Jarry’s absurdism—and share in Ubu’s grotesque fate. After all, wasn’t capitalism itself a pataphysical proposition? It was endlessly cutting the branch on which it sits, devastating the planet and endangering the human species while claiming to improve its lot. Capital didn’t care a fig for the fate of humanity. The real wasn’t its business. It had cancelled the principle of reality and substituted a codification of a higher order, a hyper-reality that made the real obsolete. Its dirge-like flows were self-referential, leaving everything else in a state of self-induced simulation. The flows of capital were posthumous, post-human. In their nihilistic energy, they carried the seeds of their own destruction. Only Ubu, Jarry’s truculent hero, the coward king cannibalizing his own entourage, and himself in the process, could account for such a bullish cynicism. The society of the spectacle was turning into a soft version of the theater of cruelty, a burlesque of death with the globe as its stage. Life was being exchanged for nothing, for a handful of glittering toys, work absorbed time like a sponge and left no traces. Baudrillard wasn’t the exterminator, but the system itself. Yet no one was paying attention.

In his Bastille days, De Sade challenged French regicides to draw revolution out of to its most extreme moral conclusions: “Fellow compatriots, a last-ditch effort is required if you really want to earn the name of Republican!” Already spinning himself silly with the system like an autistic child, Baudrillard was ready to make the extra mile. He would be the fool of capital and wave its Good News all around like a lantern: “Every system that approaches perfect operativity simultaneously approaches its downfall…it approaches absolute power and total absurdity; that is, immediate and probable subversion. A gentle push in the right place is enough to bring it crashing down.” (SE, p.4). Beware of gentle pataphysicians with a big hammer.

Baudrillard, Jean
Forget Foucault
Los Angeles:  Semiotext(e), 2007
ISBN-10# 1-58435-041-5
Introduction: Exterminating Angel by Sylvere Lotringer, Pgs 10-13

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber

It seems as though the world has been oversaturated with 'infants' of late. Or at the very least, those who have been 'infantilized.'

Of course, this thesis is not a novel one. Philosophers and 'commodity aesthetics' theoriticians like Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Guy Debord have been writing about this and related subject matter for years now. And as previously noted, even Czech animator Jan Švankmajer has recently chimed in on the subject by taking Walt Disney Corporation to task and calling Walt Disney a 'destroyer of European culture.'  Oddly and coincidently, a Tory politician once 'branded' Throbbing Gristle 'wreckers of civilization.' The aforementioned according to the July 2007 issue of The Wire magazine.

Meanwhile, in Craig Heimbichner's scathing attack on Thelema and the OTO (amongst a 'whole host' of other things), titled Blood on the Altar: The Secret History of the World's Most Dangerous Secret Society, he writes: We are in a universal lapse into a state of immaturity, a true indicator that we are in some sort of “era of the child.” This quote was extracted from a section of the book titled: The Wizards of Oz. It's worth reading the reader's comments section at length, as some interesting personages (ie Peter-Robert Koeing and Adam Parfrey) add their 'two cents' to the discussion.

At any 'rate,' Benjamin R. Barber's book should prove to be a welcomed addition to this critical body of work. Perhaps Fukuyama's 'End of History' hasn't come to pass after all. I should certainly hope not. At this point, we need all the help we can get. There aren't enough nannies to go around apparently.

click to enlarge

From Booklist
Barber, the Gershon and Carol Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland, has devoted much of his life to the study of the effects of the consumer market on individuals and society as a whole. His hypothesis that consumer culture has turned adult citizens into children by catering to the lowest common denominator rings only too true, even if the sheer density and obsequiousness of this examination are likely to turn off much of the popular readership. Therein lies the conundrum of reviewing this impressive piece of work, wherein Barber proves his theory that the market imperative has conditioned us to lap up the easy offerings and reject hard, complicated works. This lifelong study of the effects of capitalism and privatization reveals a pervasiveness of branding and homogenization from which there is seemingly no turning back. With the call to arms of grassroots resistance, he does offer a glimmer of hope; despite the heavy weight, Barber's work deserves and surely will find its audience. David Siegfried